Archive for September 2011

When I woke my son for school this morning, I showed him the newspaper and told him it was a day to remember. Twenty years from now, he will be telling his son or daughter about the day a stream of neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light. The impossible has been accomplished, the unreachable horizon breached, and our history is forever altered, though we cannot yet see the changes made possible by this single (tiny) event. I’m sure an equally energetic father, somewhere in 14th century Europe, woke his children when news came from the West: the world is round, not flat.

Yet, howsoever extraordinary the path of that first over-achieving neutrino, this unfolding day promised more: that radical change in universal physics was merely Act I, as anyone who follows “the market” knows, for it is also The Day That Gold Lost $100 of value in one trading session. That’s never happened before, but on this day of days, headlines about unique financial milestones can, indeed, be over-shadowed by radical changes in universal physics.

And yet, more. (Some of you might be thinking “He’s going to finish this entry” but not me, not me, I’m here to note more history): it is as if the Einstein-Midas phenomena has a 3rd act, a third remarkableevent: 32-tons of satellite metal just crashed to the earth, landing in someone’s backyard, and while we’ve all been appropriately forewarned not to touch or pilfer, pieces of space detritus will surely appear on eBay before my first cup of coffee tomorrow.

It is a chaotic and varietal world, I know, and there are many marvels in this midsummer’s night, but on such a day as this, when the sky fell, when gold became less than the sum of its parts, when even the outermost limit of humankind’s velocity had been broken, I am compelled to honor this majestic triad of garbage, glitter, and gravity – and grant my solemn acknowledgement to this moment in time.

As our necklaced string of days goes, this one sparkles a bit more than the rest.